CLEANING the GOLD: A JACK REACHER and WILL TRENT SHORT STORY by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child

Published in 2019 by HarperAudio.
Read by Eric Jason Martin and Jeff Harding.
Duration: 2 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

The title says this is a short story, but the print version of Cleaning the Gold is 129 pages and I would call that a novella.

Karin Slaughter's Will Trent character works with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He is working on a cold case murder based on the activities of the very first Jack Reacher novel, The Killing Floor. Trent is looking for Jack Reacher based on a 20 year old DNA sample.

Reacher is working in Fort Knox and Trent assumes an undercover identity to

Pallets of gold in Fort Knox - they are featured
in the audiobook.

find him...

The book is all written in third person with Slaughter writing the Will Trent sections and Child writing the Reacher sections.

Lee Child is one of my favorites, but Karin Slaughter is certainly not. In fact, she's one of the few authors I refuse to read any longer. Just to compare, including this review I have reviewed 26 Jack Reacher books or short stories and just 3 Karin Slaughter books. This novella suffers from being mostly written by Karin Slaughter.

The readers were okay. One read for Will Trent, the other for Jack Reacher. The reader for Jack Reacher was doing his best to sound like Dick Hill, the reader that has read most of Lee Child's audiobooks.

In the end, this wasn't much of a story. There were amusing observations about Jack Reacher, but the story wasn't much. Reacher did most of the work and even then they made leaps of deduction that I couldn't fathom.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5 (mostly because of the aforementioned observations about Reacher and the fact that I learned a few things about the gold reserves at Fort Knox. I can only recommend it if you are trying to round out your Jack Reacher or Will Trent collection. This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: CLEANING the GOLD: A JACK REACHER and WILL TRENT SHORT STORY by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child.

A Faint Cold Fear by Karin Slaughter

Not very good

Originally published in 2003.

First the positives:

The over-arching storyline of A Faint Cold Fear is really a pretty good concept of a story. I did want to know who did it so I read until the very end.

Now, the negatives:

Too many characters that are introduced just once and then continually referred to from that moment on by their first name. There are nearly 20 characters that I am supposed to remember with no reminder of what they do in the plot. Just a name and I have to go back in to the book and look up who Kevin or Richard was.

Plot items are brought in (the arrow drawn in the dirt outside the dorm window, for example) that are a big deal for about 3 pages and then are totally dropped.

Lena. Her behavior is insane. She's terrified to be touched (being the victim of a horrific rape), afraid to be out of control and yet she goes to a rave party full of drugs, gets drunk and loses control with a dangerous man who has already hurt her.

The relationship between Lena and Chief Jeffrey Tolliver is so contrived, so "fakey" that it just failed to click at any level for me. Every scene between them seemed forced.

A shotgun IS NOT a rifle. They are both long guns, but they are different. This is not specialized knowledge. Ask anyone who knows a thing about guns and they'll explain the difference. It's not hard. I can't believe no one caught that at the publishing house, either.

I also cannot believe that any college campus would let any student, even a student on a skeet-shooting team, keep their gun in their room on campus. Campuses have been gun-sensitive places for years and years. I know of a student who had to live off campus because he refused to leave his skeet guns in a designated locker at a university in Indiana in the 1980s.

I rate this book 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: A Faint Cold Fear (Grant County Mysteries)

Reviewed on July 14, 2008.

Martin Misunderstood (audiobook) by Karin Slaughter

Seinfeld's Wayne Knight's first foray into audiobooks

Published by BBC Audiobooks America in 2008
Read by Wayne Knight
Lasts 2 hours 30 minutes

Karin Slaughter's Martin Misunderstood is a short (2 1/2 hours) audiobook about a loser named Martin, his awful mother, his cruel co-workers and his miserable life in Georgia. Martin is framed for murder and his extensive readings of James Patterson, John Grisham and Patricia Cornwell are all he has to help himself.

Positives:

Wayne Knight did a great job of creating the voices, especially those of Martin's mother and Unique (You-nee-quay). Knight's comic timing was a big help with some weak material.

Negatives:

Karin Slaughter.

This is my second Karin Slaughter book (both this summer) and I am not going to read her anymore.

Wayne Knight

Slaughter spends nearly half of the book just setting up the characters and then she just wraps it all up like she was on a deadline and she just had to get some sort of ending on the story. This book just clunks to an end - sort of Twilight Zone-esque but not like one of the good episodes. More like one of those bad ones where you look at the person next to you and say, "That's it?"

Wayne Knight's performance turns a one-star review into two stars. I hope he reads a lot more audiobooks, just not Karin Slaughter's books.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Martin Misunderstood.

Reviewed on July 21, 2008.